Rise Of Nations Extended Edition Best Mods

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Leontina Heidgerken

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Aug 4, 2024, 3:14:29 PM8/4/24

to verbackraldie

MANYOF THE FOLLOWING POSTS HAVE BEEN COPIED/PASTED FROM THE OLD ROF FORUMS. It's from several years ago, and I'm not sure if it's still completely current/accurate - if anybody knows otherwise, please PM me and I'll be happy to fix/update this information.

This mod changes the frontlines on the Galicia map to represent the situation from September 20th, 1916, to July 1st, 1917. The Russian General Brusilov has made massive gains, taking Chernovitsy, Kolomyya, and Stanislau. The Austro-Hungarian Army has been smashed, but, due to the incompetence of Brusilov's peers and superiors, Austria-Hungary has not been knocked out of the war, and now they can consolidate their defences in the Carpathian mountains. And, to make matters worse for the Russians, fresh German reinforcements have arrived.

Just an obvious thought - are you sure you're running in mods on mode? Also, you might want to double-check your folder structure in your mods folders - perhaps you wound up with some unwanted extra folders or something during the unzip process.

Hmm - I hardly ever get down low enough along the front to notice things like the moving soldiers, but I see the static aircraft at most airfields in my PWCG missions. I've never specifically gone looking for any of these elements, so I can't really say for sure if I'm getting them in my missions or not (except for the static airplanes, of course). Maybe if I can tear myself away from flying the new BoK map in VR I'll try to fire up some PWCG missions and go hunting for some of them.

Ultimately, I had to manually install all of the mods. Thankfully, only two of them overwrite any main files and the rest are basically LUAScript stuff. I generally wouldn't "support" or recommend installing any mods without having a solid backup of everything but in this case, that's what it took to get things working for me.

Check LUAScripts folder - no worldobjects folder (although it appears enabled in JSGME, it is not enabled, didn't write the worldobjects folder to LUAScripts and [obviously] the mod doesn't appear in the game)

Glad you got it working. My favorite two seater mission is ground attack in the middle of a battle. The soldiers are shooting at each other and at you. You have a few bombs and they may do a little damage, but in no way are they enough to do too much harm. So you go back and strafe a bit. All the while there is the plink plink as your crate starts taking hits. Go home? One more pass? Great fun. Roland is my favorite for these missions.

The program severely limits the amount of AI driven ground units. They are there when they are part of the mission. I also put some in randomly, however they are not pervasive. If you are flying a fighter campaign there will not be too much there (waypoints for offensive patrols will usually have something on the ground).

Thanks -- I understand. Because I am flying fighter missions and because the world objects are not pervasive, I am only going to see ground objects that affect (directly or indirectly) my mission. If i fly ground attack missions (in a Roland for example) then I would see more ground objects such as vehicles and moving soldiers.

And because I can confirm that I have mods working in JGSME (fubar's landscape for example), then the issue is not a problem...it is just a reflection of my mission type (fighter) and the program limits for AI driven ground units.

Based on recent posts it looks like this mod is still under active development, so I'm going to give it a thread of its own so it will be easier to keep adding posts to it going forward - see this thread for details: -rof-united-ed-ai-improved-vers-11-and-12-by-vons/

Well, I've finally finished the project I've been working on for a while, to get rid of the strange zig-zag forest lines found in many areas along the front lines of the Western Front map in the stock game, which look like the following:

I've put all the modified files (including both the on-the-ground fixes and the in-game display map tweaks so what you see on your map in game will essentially match the modified forest areas on the ground) into a JSGME-ready mod package, which is available here:

I've tested this as well as I could given the time available (free-flying around up and down the front lines, and doing some career mode missions as well), and I think it's working just fine. However, I haven't been able to cover the entire map so if anybody spots any unintended side effects or map/ground anomalies they think might be attributable to this mod please feel free to snap and post a screenshot of the relevant area (preferably like the one above, with your map up too so I can figure out where to look for the problem) and I'll be happy to check into it.

I'm not familiar with that particular mod, but I looked at several other terrain/landscape mods that I have used and they tend to modify different types of files so there shouldn't be a problem, but if you see anything weird let me know.

Wow, that side-by-side comparison shows the extent of how the forests get trimmed back. So there are no trees/forests that come up closer to NML anymore? With this degree of visual change it was indeed necessary to alter the in-game map, so good-on-you for also including that challenge.

Not wishing to appear negative, but looks like getting rid of the zig-zags is a lesser-of-two-evils situation, with your mod the clear winner though unfortunately introducing a visual bias of its own along the mud.

Yeah, I know. There are a few areas along the front where the trees are a bit closer than shown in that "after" picture, but I couldn't find any consistent, repeatable way to do that and for the most part the trees are pretty far from the mud. I'm still experimenting with trying to find other ways to deal with the transition between the mud and the trees so maybe they can be brought back closer together without re-creating the zig-zags, but all attempts so far at alternate methods have failed and this version was still so much better (in my view at least) than seeing those zig-zags that I thought it would be worth releasing in the meantime.

Hey SYN_Bandy - thanks for pushing me on the mud thing. Nothing ready for prime time yet, but I just wanted to tease something I've been working on that might prove to be useful. Can't do this approach all up and down the front (problems with stray trees in lots of areas), but there may well be specific areas that would benefit from this:

Minor WIP update - I think this methodology has resolved the transition/border problem pretty well - it's not as dramatic-looking an improvement, but I think the gap between trees and mud still looks appreciably less than with version 1:

Still tweaking, but making progress I think. I can probably get closer in any areas that don't have the stray tree problem, but here I think it's gone about as close as it can without making the stray trees look weird.

It might be of interest to you, that your mod and that xjouve mod are excluding each other. Xjouve's mod attempted to recreate the actual frontline changes during the course of major battles, i.e. Verdun and Champagne etc. One of the most fascinating mod works in ROF ,IMHO. Unfortunately xjouve never finished his most ambitious project, it has been published as WIP mod, even back in 2012, i think. I got it from a big mod pack from the french "checksix-forum",edited by actionjoe, iirc. There's something irresistible in any scenery mod to me, since that old SWWISA days, so i'll be following this thread with particular interest. Best regards.

Thanks for the info. Yeah, to do what Xjouve was trying to do would have altered that same files that my mod changes, so the two will not be compatible. If I can get my hands on that mod, maybe I can pick it apart and see what he was doing - although it sounds like it would be a ton of extra work, it might be possible for me to apply my techniques to tweaking his mod so that I could maybe create a zig-zag-free version of his mod.

Well, look again - it's certainly more subtle than the first post-version-1 attempt was (the picture you posted above) but the mud is definitely closer to the trees in the second WIP picture than in the released version 1 picture. However, the transition from mud to non-mud is a lot more natural in the 2nd WIP picture so the difference is not as pronounced as you're probably looking for.

Unfortunately, bringing the mud closer to the trees without bringing the more natural transition with it looks very weird, and bringing the mud and the more natural transition closer to the trees starts to re-create the dreaded zig-zags and/or just looks stupid with the stray trees. I've been up and down the front lines trying a variety of things, but between the stray trees and the places where the mud spans multiple underlying mask files (where any tweaking I've been able to do just keeps creating obvious seam lines in the mud), it doesn't look like there are going to be enough places where moving the mud will be useful (and noticeable) enough to make the effort worthwhile.

Thus, I think I'm going to abandon that part of the effort for now and just stick with the released version 1 for a while. I do plan to continue exploring what it is about the mud that is causing the zig-zags in the first place, to see if there's any chance of tweaking whatever that is to get rid of the zig-zags instead of just moving the trees away from the mud, but for right now I'm out of ideas on how to figure out how the mud works and what can be tweaked about it, so version 2 will have to wait for another epiphany or another kind soul to come along and give me some clues about playing in the mud.

Too bad there isn't some version of trees between full foliage and broken stumps, for instance, if there was a simple zone of trees with no leaves between the forest and NML. That isn't in the game engine, so sadly, only what might have been had the devs put a little more thought in...